Student incivility, defined as a student behavior perceived to be disrespectful or disruptive to the overall learning environment in a course, can negatively affect the science learning environment and instructors. The transition to online science courses during the COVID-19 pandemic created a unique environment for student incivility to take place in undergraduate courses.
Mental health conditions can impact college students' academic achievements and experiences. As such, students may choose to disclose mental illnesses on medical school applications. Yet, no recent studies have investigated to what extent disclosure of a mental health condition may impact whether an applicant is accepted to medical school. We conducted an audit study to address this gap and surveyed 99 potential medical school admissions committee members from over 40 M.D.-granting schools in the United States. Participants rated a fictitious portion of a single medical school application on acceptability, competence, and likeability. They were randomly assigned to a condition: an application that explained a low semester GPA due to (A) a mental health condition, (B) a physical health condition, or (C) offered no explanation. After rating their respective application, all committee members were asked about when revealing a mental health condition would be beneficial and when it would be detrimental. Using ANOVAs, multinomial regression, and open-coding, we found that medical school admissions committee members do not rate applications lower when a mental health condition is revealed. Committee members highlighted that revealing a mental health condition to demonstrate resiliency could be beneficial, but if the reference is vague or the condition is not being managed, it could be detrimental to a student's application. This work indicates that medical school admissions committee members do not exhibit a bias against mental health conditions and provides recommendations on how to discuss mental illness on medical school applications.
Student incivility, defined as a behavior perceived by the instructor or other students to be disrespectful and/or disruptive to the overall learning environment, can negatively impact student learning and instructors. During the COVID‐19 pandemic, the transition to an online teaching format created a unique environment for undergraduate incivility to take place. Further, student incivility has historically been disproportionately experienced by instructors of particular demographic groups, including women and People of Color, but it is currently unknown whether these demographic differences exist in the online environment. In this study, we designed a survey based on previous literature to measure instructor perceptions of student incivility during the COVID‐19 pandemic. We surveyed 283 science instructors from a random subset of research‐intensive institutions, Masters‐granting institutions, primarily undergraduate institutions, and community colleges who taught undergraduate courses with synchronous online components in the fall 2020 semester about their experiences with student incivility. Using binary logistic regression and open‐coding to analyze our data, we found that over half of instructors surveyed reported experiencing student incivility during fall 2020, with women being significantly more likely to report student incivility than men (Figure 1). Compared to white instructors, Instructors of Color were significantly more likely to report an increase in student incivility in fall 2020 compared to teaching the same course in previous semesters (Figure 1). The most common uncivil behaviors reported by instructors were requests to change student grades, sleeping in class, and excessively communicating with the instructor outside of class. When discussing how they handled experiences of student incivility, over half of instructors reported being irritated or annoyed as a consequence and tolerating or ignoring the behavior as a coping strategy, which could have detrimental effects on the learning environment for all students. This work indicates that student incivility exists in the online synchronous learning environment and that the negative impacts of student incivility are not distributed equally among all instructors, presenting additional burdens for women and Instructors of Color.
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